“It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”

Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.

This makes sense to me as a principle, but the idea that the paper is genuinely making a good argument seems really questionable.

Among originalists, though, this interpretation [apparently that “We the People,” refers to white people, and therefore the constitution applies to them exclusively] has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.

Sounds like not even other originalists take it seriously. On its face the idea seems really stupid, since the wording of that part of the constitution doesn’t involve race, and whiteness has always been a very loosely defined concept with a lot of ambiguity that wouldn’t be a natural fit for a legal principle. So maybe the paper is getting a high grade and an award is itself a display of personal bias.